Impartido por:

Christopher Balme

Transcripción

Last week, we defined the theatrical event and our notion of globality for this course based on the concepts of deterritorialization, modernization and connectivity. I showed you how to research historical newspapers in online archives and pointed to other helpful resources you can find on the web. In this lecture, we are going to examine the relationship between theater, globalization and mobility. Mobility is understood in two ways. Firstly, as migration. That means as peoples relocated to different parts of the globe, I the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So too did their theatrical cultures follow them. Secondly, and more specifically as theatrical mobility, through touring companies and performers, that in some cases quite literally moved around the world. In this lecture, we will be exploring in more depth. The concepts of deteritorialization and modernization, in order to discuss these historical processes in relation to the theater. Deteritorialization was coined by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972. Here it refered to a type of fluid subjectivity, typical of Capitalist culture. Most globalization theories, however, use the term in a cultural sense. Here, it means the experience of being disconnected from traditional cultural matrices by the experience of migration. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls it, quote: "... one of the central forces of the modern world", with the following results: Relocating and mixing different classes of people, creating exaggerated attachments to politics and religions of home, often resulting in fundamentalism. And, creating new artistic and media markets in the diaspora. In this sense, deterritorialization can be equated with displacement. It is first and foremost a way of thinking about cultural contact in spatialized terms. Culture is tied to territory, and if territory is left or lost, then so is the culture. Cultures, however, are, in the first instance, transported and passed down by human beings who carry their cultures with them. When they relocate, so do their cultures and cultural practices. These altered forms are sometimes spoken of in negative terms as being adulterated or second hand. But more recent theories also look at the productive forces unleashed be deterritorialization. Detrritorialization is not therefore entirely a negative force. People use media and their imagination to combat the negative effects of deterritorialization so that ultimately the experience of deterritorialization leads to reterritorialization. The process whereby new ties are established with the new cultural space. Although contemporary theorists are thinking of television, and more recently, the Internet, the medium in our case is the theater in all its many forms and practices. We need to look at the theatricality of mobility. Quite literally, the means of transportation and communication that made this expansion possible. The expansion of shipping lines, railways, and telegraphic communication. Without which, theater on the move would have been impossible. These technological advancements represent one dimension of modernization. Certain forms of theater and music also come to stand as a sign of modernization. Modernization is one of the most controversial terms in our vocabulary because it often stands for exploitation as well as benefit. It is also seldom used in relation to theatre, but I argue, it needs to be. Modernization is usually understood to mean the introduction of mainly western technologies and institutions to societies which had been traditional in outlook. While it is clear that the implementation of telegraphic communication, railways, and printing presses were all signs of modernization in this sense, we should also include western style theater in this process. The historian, Eric Hobsbawm, was one of the first to make this point in his famous study, The Age of Empire. I quote: "Certain institutions typified the zone of 'development' or European domination. Notably, the essentially secular university, which did not exist outside this zone, and for different purposes, the Opera house. Both these institutions reflected the penetration of the dominant 'Western' civilization." Hobsbawm is noting, not celebrating, the spread of secular universities and opera houses in this period. Note also his use of inverted commas around the terms development and western. Nevertheless, both universities and opera houses came to be seen as symbols of modernization. The sociologist, Shmuel Eisenstadt has coined the phrase, "multiple modernities", to show that modernization invariably led to a wide range of responses to the way societies interpret modernity and modern institutional patterns and dynamics. Institutions must be seen in terms of their cultural variability and not as monolithic entities. Eisenstadt's idea of multiple modernities will be the one followed in this course. While the technologies of modernization were relatively similar, the responses were manifold. And it is this plurality of responses that interests us here.